'One nation, giving to a second nation, the country of a third'

Europeans, not Americans, painfully sought ways “to wash off” the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question) without being anti-Semitic and without going into “unwanted theological analysis” of Judaism and its relation to Christianity. But later, Americans became the architects of that solution in Palestine in the form and shape of Israel.

By the 1840s, the Young Hegelians, like philosopher and theologian Bruno Bauer, had begun circulating their mutedly “anti-Semitic” arguments that Jews could achieve political emancipation in Europe. Keen observers like the political theorist Karl Marx, however, who was writing a book about Bauer and the idea that Jews themselves were seeking “release from the bonds of Europe,” sought to expose this implicit racism rather than accept the notion that it was Europeans who were trying to rid themselves of Jews. Marx recognized that such circumlocution, a deliberate attempt to be vague or evasive, served as a precursor to the ideas that would later culminate in the Holocaust.

Marx's own attitude toward European Jewry has been characterized as ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. He published articles in several newspapers, clearly accusing Jews of being "economic criminals." His readers could conclude that “those Jews were responsible for hunger and rising prices in Europe.”

Herzl's Israel

Towards the end of the century, another Jew, Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and the father of modern political Zionism and the Zionist Organization, came to the rescue of both Jews and the Europeans who had been trying to find a solution to the “Judenfrage.” (Ev